Washington Burning

June 1, 2008
Bordewich ("Bound for Canaan") and Standiford, each with his own emphasis and style, offer fresh perspectives on the early history of Washington, DC. Bordewich, a freelance journalist, offers a substantially more well-rounded and comprehensive story, explaining in satisfying detail how the city's site was chosen and how political scheming, personal conflicts, and greed almost doomed the project of designing and constructing a capital city from scratch. Two themes are woven throughout his narrative: the important but often overlooked role played by slaves and former freed slaves and the constant North-South debate at the root of the bitter dispute over the capital's locale; the chosen site bore both symbolic and practical importance. Bordewich introduces readers to the key players: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, African American surveyor Benjamin Banneker, intractable and ill-fated architect and city planner Maj. Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the city's triumvirate of commissioners, and a host of pernicious financial speculators. Their contributions, both helpful and detrimental, are thoroughly documented. The convoluted political and financial details occasionally bog down an otherwise engaging work of popular history.

Standiford (director, creative writing program, Florida Intl. Univ.; "Last Train to Paradise"), who has published both fiction and nonfiction, gives us a work far more colorfully written but omitting or downplaying many important facets and details of the project. Banneker and slavery are all but overlooked, and the greedy and incompetent speculators get but scant mention in an entertaining but incomplete account. Yet Standiford has a novelist's gift for engaging, briskly paced narration, and his chronicle, as far as it goes, is scrupulously researched. He focuses on the early successes and eventual failure of L'Enfant, one of the more complex and fascinating characters of the era. The flamboyant Frenchman headed the city's planning and construction until his controversial dismissal midway through the project. Standiford explains how the architect's fiscal incompetence and, more notably, stubbornness and indestructible ego doomed a promising career. He also recounts the 1814 destruction of much of Washington, DC, by invading British soldiers, but his title is largely metaphorical as the bulk of his book concerns the tumultuous relationships between L'Enfant and his superiors. These two quite different volumes complement each other well. Both are recommended for public and academic libraries, but libraries seeking just one book on the early history of the city will be better served by Bordewich.Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina, Thomas Cooper Lib., Columbia

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2008
Facing the profusion of histories on the founding of Washington, D.C., Standiford pitches this narrative as a fresh appreciation of the capitals first 25 years. Standiford is a novelist, and this background serves him well in developing the characters involved in platting, building, and burning Washington, and central to the narrative is Pierre Charles LEnfant. To him goes the glory of the street plan, but LEnfants talents in design and construction were not matched by political acumen. He was fired in 1792, and his grievances attract Standifords sympathy as well as his perception that unbending pride was the source of LEnfants undoing. Standiford then turns to the tangled details of constructing buildings for the president and Congress, which, in the course of fiscal and physical challenges and further firings of personnel, were ready for incineration by the British in 1814. Closing with the citys recovery from the War of 1812 and the recognition belatedly accorded to LEnfant a century later by burial in Arlington National Cemetery, Standifords dramatized synthesis is a solid choice for the history set.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)